What Creatives and Marketers Think About Generative AI

After years of talk about the power of artificial intelligence, it was the sudden impact of generative AI earlier this year that got the global marketing community to sit up and take notice. The conversations have ranged from work efficiencies to existential crises, and everything in between. On the final day of the 2023 Cannes Lions festival, Adweek gathered a group of creative executives to get their thoughts and expectations of AI. The four executives were: Renato Fernandez (RF), chief creative officer at TBWA\Chiat\Day Los AngelesDanielle Hawley (DH), global executive creative director for UberChris Duffey (CD), strategic development manager, Adobe Creative CloudMark Sandys (MS), chief innovation officer, Diageo How to Manage 6 Generative AI Weaknesses That Impact Brand Experiences Adweek: Where will creativity come from in the future? Will it come from brand-prompt engineers or new roles that emerge? DH: Because I'm a neophyte who is just taking my first couple steps into the journey, I think about things like creative testing. For example, Nike and “Just Do It”—if you had trained an AI to optimize for “Just Do It,” it would have corrected the grammar unless there was a prompt written that said, “optimize for culture." Sandys responded to Hawley’s point with his own experience of having tested Guinness’s much-lauded “Surfer” ad through Kantar’s tool Link+, which advised that they change the language in the copy. MS: But that's where the role of the creatives and the branding comes in to say, "No, there's something in this. OK, let's take that learning and redirect." CD: What's happening is the margin between ideation and execution and craft is getting greatly condensed because of GenAI. And so the role of craft is not going to be diminished, but it's going to be accelerated. AI is going to reinforce the importance of strategy, ideation, originality, and the execution will be easier to do. That's going to start to create almost this circular experience where you can create, deploy and then measure, optimize and train it on that set. And it's just going to get better and better, faster and faster at scale. I get really excited about the conversation about brand tone and how that's going to have to lead.Danielle Hawley, global executive creative director, Uber RF: With the prompts, the quality of the art director doubles their need because you need to be able to produce a prompt that is so creative. If I ask for a photo of something, you give him something generic, but if I tell it about the lighting and then give it a reference of styles of photography or a painting, you get something that's unique to me. So, I think the art of the prompt will evolve tremendously. We're living in 1.0 of this, and I think the prompt is not going to be the way it is going to be in the future—that's just our way into AI. Adweek: Will GenAI become a way for agencies to save money on things such as ad production? CD: The entry point of this first chapter of how to use AI is where can you apply AI for inefficiencies or bottom-line growth. And we're stuck and centered on that. The next level is how do you create a bridge to what you do with all that free time for top-line growth to create innovation and to create new business models? That then leads to this broader conversation of should/can the industry evolve its billing model from an hourly base totally to fixed/value-based. That's where I think it gets quite transformational. Sandys revealed that Diageo was already using AI to help with inefficiencies, including cutting down on the length of time it takes between initial brainstorming sessions to briefing the agency to researching their creative response. It cut out weeks of the process, Sandys revealed. (l-r) Danielle Hawley, Mark Sandys, Stephen Lepitak, Renato Fernandez and Chris Duffey. MS: We've built a kind of walled garden to avoid some IP issues that we're concerned about. We did a Smirnoff global workshop last month where we had all the Smirnoff leaders from around the world coming up with ideas and being able to immediately visualize 10-50 versions of each concept, then live-optimize them with consumers and then test them. So we were condensing six weeks into a day. The energy from it was amazing. So that is making things more efficient. But it was also getting us further faster, because of course you spark off different concepts and so on. And when I spoke about it with my design director, he then became the person who was leading the process. DH: What could be good is that it is going to speed up the process to get to what works. I get really excited about that when I think about the conversation about brand tone and how ultimately that's going to have to lead in this environment. How do we stay distinctive? I think that breadth has been able to go wide to get to the point where, you know, "This is my distinctive look, these are my distinctive assets." That could be very interesting. Adweek: That then means brands really must have a grasp of what they stand for. RF: AI needs a creative director. We will always need a creative director, and you are going to have good and bad creative directors. So, it is the usage of the information that's going to separate the pack. How Account Directors Can Perfect Being the Vital Link Between Agency and Client Hawley spoke about inefficiencies that AI might overcome, such as the experience of running teams around the world and agreeing on a creative direction, only to arrive on set to find that the director and the client each have different visions for the shoot. Instead, the teams can use GenAI tools to collaborate and agree on a near-complete storyboard in advance. DH: The shortcut that AI can do in that moment of those storyboards is that it helps the communication lines between all the people involved. This is a team sport, so helping communication before you get on set will end up with something that's even more distinctive for your brand because everybody's on the same page. It's really important to get the legal boundaries to make sure that you can protect the clients in this battle.Renato Fernandez, chief creative officer, TBWA\Chiat\Day CD: There's this realization of the output that we're starting to apply to legacy frameworks, whether it be processes or websites, and that’s triggering this realization: Everything's got to change for AI to work. DH: There's the good side that there are probably people who are maybe not prolific at Photoshop who are going to be able to transcend their lack of skills, just to articulate what they mean in terms of their visual storytelling aspects. But then the flip side is you're going to have marketing managers all over the world who are going to start to say, "Well, I can just do that. Why do I need the internal creative team?" So there's a flip side of who we're allowing to visualize what normally is a creative process that should be owned by creative people. … I do think we're going to go into a phase where lots of people think they're creative directors. This led the group to discuss the evolution of computer-generated images (CGI) within movies, comparing the hype around using AI to conversations in the '90s on how CGI would replace actors one day and referencing the Star Wars prequels as having used CGI to produce, debatably, lower-quality films. CD: We've been saying GenAI is uniting the C-suite. In many ways there is a need for alignment, and quite often the chief creative officer does the creative stuff, the CMO does the marketing, vision and so on. And now because of the technical infrastructure needed to deploy this correctly, all disciplines really have to come and have a seat at the table because it is infinitely complex from a tech stack standpoint to be able to ingest the insights in real time to create the production in near real time to deploy and measure. And so that technical infrastructure, I think, will be another skill set needed within the creative strategy plan. Why B-to-B Marketers Should Adopt a B-to-P Mindset Adweek: What safeguards are needed with the introduction of AI into the creative process? Duffey revealed that Adobe had held back on releasing its AI tech for months despite the growing interest from brands to ensure it was commercially ready, ethically sourced and that contributors were being paid. MS: Being ethically sourced is something that we're [Diageo] worrying about, at the moment, around how to know where the data has been drawn from and if we are working with AI, then how is that benefiting us? CD: We made the early call not to train on generative art. So we only generate off of first-generation content, so what happens if you generate off of a generation? With that said, brands will now have the opportunity to create their own data set. MS: That’s going to be very attractive to brands. (l-r) Danielle Hawley, Mark Sandys, Stephen Lepitak, Renato Fernandez and Chris Duffey. CD: But one of the new skillsets needed is: How do you label it and metatag it? Which ones do you include? What’s the impact of that? So my point is that we need an industrywide agreement on standards. Duffey also highlighted the creation of the Content Authenticity Initiative, which includes more than 600 companies such as Omnicom and aims to provide traceability of content across software, hardware and media channels. CD: So now you can trace where it came from, what was manipulated, and it's all watermarked. And now you can start to see the value, you can start to measure the impact of the content. RF: It's really important to get the legal boundaries of the whole thing to make sure that you can protect the clients in this battle. Adweek: Is GenAI a threat to in-house creative teams, or does it strengthen the case for those? DH: I run an in-house team, and I don’t think it’s all that different. MS: Yes, there will be more of a creative voice for clients working in-house than there has been before, which clients need to handle with care and understand that the best clients have always given space and trust to the role creativity plays as well, and that will continue.

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Stephen Lepitak

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Stephen Lepitak